Georgia’s 2020 past hangs over the state ahead of Election Day 2026
To tout their readiness for the midterms, Fulton County officials invited media to the same sprawling elections hub where FBI agents seized more than 650 boxes of ballots and other 2020 election records nine months ago.
The raid was part of a criminal investigation into a county that’s been central to President Donald Trump’s spurious election rigging claims, but it was hardly mentioned. The hub is now a polling location.
When asked, local officials downplayed the federal investigation and conspiracy theorists. They said the investigation hasn’t affected preparations or poll worker recruitment.
“In Fulton County, we’ve always had to work in the last six years with a lot of chatter, a lot of noise, but we continue to do the work and keep focus,” Fulton County Election Board Chair Sherri Allen said.
Still, unease about what the Trump administration might try to do in a county that has been an epicenter for 2020 election conspiracies persists among voters, voting rights groups and Democrats.
“I am worried about meddling on the federal level,” said Brian Bellinger, a 47-year-old voter from Atlanta, during early voting on Thursday. “The amount of overreach that we’ve seen — it feels unprecedented.”
Conspiratorial beliefs about the election administration are hard to dismiss when they’ve permeated the fabric of the federal and state government. And few states have been haunted by the 2020 election more than Georgia — years of investigations into claims, an election interference probe and election law changes in the wake of the contentious vote.
This year, critics of the president fear how far the Trump administration will go to cast doubt on the vote or to ensure Republicans hold onto power in Congress.
Years of election changes
Almost every year since 2020, the Republican-controlled General Assembly has altered how elections are run.
In 2021, the Legislature restricted the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, empowered the State Election Board to replace any county’s “underperforming” elections board and more in a sweeping elections overhaul law. Further changes have led to more and more election audits, expanded voter eligibility challenges, and made new recount requirements for some statewide races.
But for all the changes and the cacophony of claims about Georgia’s elections, most in-person voters are casting ballots in 2026 just as they did in 2020 on voting touchscreens widely deployed across the state. Trump and his allies fixated on the touchscreen machines after his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, claiming they manipulated results. The president said earlier this year he regretted not seizing machines.
Experts say there’s no indication of tampering in 2020 or since. Still, such claims have fueled a move in the state Legislature to ditch the voting system and do away with QR codes on ballots used by scanners to count votes in Georgia.
Security experts have identified flaws in machines, and the state hasn’t implemented security upgrades in the system, which has become a rallying cry among some conservative critics in recent weeks as they’ve urged for federal intervention.
Earlier this month, State Election Board Executive Director James Mills asked the Trump administration to step in and require the state to update voting machines before Tuesday’s vote and give leaders a deadline to do away with counting votes using QR codes.
All of the calls for Trump to step in have given skeptics ammunition to sow more doubts about machines, but there’s no indication that the administration intends to act on the requests. Even if it did, experts say the federal government doesn’t have the authority to force changes to a state’s voting system or the time to do so before Election Day.
Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that Americans deserve safe, secure and transparent elections.
“President Trump believes every legal vote must count, every election must be protected, and Americans must have complete confidence in the integrity of our elections,” she said.
But ideas once viewed as outlandish now have the ear of some state officials and the federal government. Some critics fear that the president will heed their calls to take extraordinary action in the midterms. Others are more skeptical.
Gabriel Sterling, a senior fellow at the Secure Democracy Foundation and a former top official at the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, noted that courts have largely blocked the president’s efforts to assert more federal control over elections and that the investigation into Fulton hasn’t produced prosecutions.
“I think any attempts to do anything after Election Day are going to be for naught,” he said at a recent Rotary Club of Atlanta luncheon. “And again, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of the stuff.”
The noise around elections has bred mistrust. A sizable minority of Georgia’s electorate is concerned the midterms won’t be conducted fairly and accurately. Despite those misgivings, voters have broken early voting turnout records headed into Election Day.
Legal skirmishes
Trump has never let go of his false insistence that he won the presidential vote in Georgia six years ago.
“I also won the election in Georgia,” the president said at a recent Dalton rally. “We won it by a lot, if you remember. What a mess that was. And you see what happened in Fulton County with the ballots. … What a crooked deal that was.”
Court cases around that election persist years later, though they are dwindling.
Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza settled a yearslong defamation suit months ago with an auditor from Gwinnett County who was falsely portrayed in the movie “2000 Mules” as a “ballot mule” returning fraudulent absentee ballots.
In a separate case, a federal judge halted the U.S. Department of Justice’s demands for the identities of 2020 Fulton County election workers, which the DOJ appealed.
And several State Election Board members don’t believe the numerous investigations into Fulton’s 2020 election were adequate. They want to take a crack at the records themselves.
The board has sought various 2020 records from Fulton for years, but they have yet to broker a deal. This time, they are seeking an estimated 1.2 million digital scans of the election materials the FBI seized.
Another durable election conspiracy is the belief that voters illegally stuffed large numbers of fraudulent absentee ballots in drop boxes. But efforts to restrict absentee voting haven’t fared much better this year.
Trump has long criticized mail voting, falsely claiming such ballots are “corrupt,” but his plan to restrict access to such ballots for the midterms was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court in September.
In Georgia, the Republican National Committee, Republican Secretary of State candidate Tim Fleming and others filed two lawsuits months before the midterms to curb policies developed by Fulton and Gwinnett that expanded the locations voters could drop off absentee ballots. Both cases were dismissed.
In fact, in the Fulton case, a superior court judge tossed a suit because the county had already ended the program by the time the complaint was filed.
When observers watch in Fulton County as returns come in after polls close Tuesday, they will be standing near where FBI agents carted off boxes of 2020 ballots in January.
For county officials, the best-case scenario is an uneventful one. But even with a smooth 2026, it appears the county cannot outrun 2020.